Middle of Nowhere' tells a different story about doing time

By LISA KENNEDY, Digital First Media

Monday, November 26, 2012

The Sundance Film Festival offers no shortage of movies with flash, whipsmart wit and indie grit. But the fest also serves as launch pad for quieter outings. Take writer-director Ava DuVernay’s “Middle of Nowhere.”

The hushed, tenderly observant drama about a young woman trying to do right by herself and her marriage while her husband is in prison won the award for best director at January’s fest.

When we meet Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi), she is on a bus headed to the prison where husband Derek (Omari Hardwick) is beginning an eight-year sentence. That the filmmaker doesn’t tell us why Derek’s in prison until deeper into the story is but one example of the movie’s restraint.

As the couple sits across from each other in the visiting room, Ruby, a nurse, tells Derek she’s not going to pursue medical school any longer. It would be too demanding on top of their new reality, she says. There’s no recrimination in her voice. She’s just pragmatic.

The last thing he wanted for her was to defer her dreams, he tells her. This isn’t a lie either.

So goes the conversation of a couple still committed to each other. They’re at the start of a challenge that demands the stamina of a marathon. The movie leaps ahead four years, and Derek looks like he’ll be able to get out early.

“Middle of Nowhere” is Ruby’s story, and Corinealdi’s turn is gently commanding. Still, without straying into a broader exploration of inmates and their loved ones, the film shows that our heroine is not alone in doing time. In an exchange on the two-hour bus ride to the prison, Ruby talks with a woman she hasn’t seen in awhile. Turns out the reason for her absence has to do with a simple, if ill-considered, act of defiance and intimacy.

The movie’s pace is measured, not out of caution but respect for its characters. Ruby is not ready to make a leap away from her marriage. So DuVernay and editor Spencer Averick don’t make rash cuts either.

Cinematographer Bradford Young (“Pariah”) uses rich ambers and chilly blue hues to set moods of possibility and melancholy. As Ruby and Derek talk, we see her submit to a prison-house ritual: a pat-down, a walk along a depressing hallway, a nervous wait in a busy visiting room.

It takes an unpleasant revelation for Ruby to change course and draw close to Brian, a Los Angeles bus driver who reaches out to her. David Oyelowo, seen recently in “Red Tails” and “Paperboy,” portrays Brian. Brian is a man worth rooting for: self-aware, tender, responsible.

But “Middle of Nowhere” isn’t about what the audience wants for Ruby. Or what her mother (Lorraine Toussaint) or her sister (Edwina Findley) or even lovely Brian hope for her.